Mouroir

by Breyten Breytenbach

Breytenbach composed this docu-dream during a period of incarceration. Mouroir (mourir: to die + miroir: mirror) is a ship of thought moving with its own hallucinatory logic through a sea of mythic images, protean characters and what the author describes as “landscapes and spaces beyond death, spaces that have always existed and will always exist.” An Orphic voyage into memory and mirage, through passages between death and life, darkness and light, oppression and flight, sense and the sensed. Mouroir.

An outspoken human rights activist, Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and visual artist. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited around the world. Born in South Africa, he immigrated to Paris in the late ’60s and became deeply involved in the anti-Apartheid movement. Breytenbach is the author of All One Horse, A Season in Paradise, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Dog Heart, and The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, among many others. He received the Alan Paton Award for Return to Paradise in 1994 and the prestigious Hertzog Prize for Poetry for Papierblom in 1999 and for Die Windvanger (Windcatcher) in 2008.

Genres: South Africa, Poetry, Fiction, Contemporary, Africa

279 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Breyten Breytenbach was a South African writer, poet, and painter. He became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. He is also known as a founding member of the Sestigers, a dissident literary movement, and was one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the late 1970s, painter, poet, and novelist Breyten Breytenbach was thrown into a South African prison for anti-apartheid remarks made in a previous book (A Season in Paradise). This volume, subtitled “mirrornotes of a novel”, comprises a series of poetic, surreal, inscrutable, and painterly stories mingling memory, the extremes of the imagination, and warped bifography. That Breytenbach started his career as a painter helps the reader make sense of these abstract, improvisatory pieces, where one can read the writer sinking into a soothing balm of imaginative escape while incarcerated for an indefinite period (nine years, in the end)—the allusiveness, the linguistic contortions, the poetic constructions, and the intellectual heft of these pieces suggests a man fighting to keep his mind from melting. The result makes for challenging, lyrical, humorous, and frustrating volume, as you might expect from prison product born of imaginative anguish.

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in the isolation and darkness of an extended prison stint as, section by section, the text was taken away from its author – see The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist for context – Breytenbach's shattered fables and half-forgotten memories play on personal pronouns and narrative time, interjecting poetic intensity across a book that seems otherwise prose. Woven across his literary phantasmagoria are the shifting tides of containment and release, surveillance and reflections. To look at the mirror and see death. To write your name and disavow it. These are the things Mouroir is composed of.

[Deborah Lynch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took quite a while to read but I gave it a deserved four star rating. On some level I feel I ought to read a book someone had the tenacity to write while in a South African prison, having been betrayed by the very people he was trying to help. Each item was handed over to the prison guards and it is clear in many of the pieces that they are being parodied or the story is aimed at them. That's all very well but if it hadn't been worth the read I wouldn't have got past the first few pages. The language is very rich, more in line with poetry than prose and the style takes a while to grow on you. It was rather like trying to read classics after reading modern literature - takes longer than you think to tune in.

I read the book in order because that's what I always do but I think I'll go back to some of the pieces randomly. The poetic style allows for that. Some of the most moving parts inevitably focused on prison life, execution or incarceration in general. I could probably read it fifty times and not get to grips with all the imagery. Some of the pieces are dream-like and you have to just let them flow over you. I think it's important sometimes to just read and not try to interpret too much as you go along. I feel it's a book that will benefit from re-reading and will keep it to do just that.

[Randal · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult book to read, owing in large part to the difficult circumstances of its creation. Breytenbach was imprisoned in South Africa and smuggled tiny bits of the book out piecemeal, having to hold it in his head throughout.
Given that, it is a transcendent work; it is however a dense and challenging read.